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FARVI DIALECT

Farvi or Farvigi is the native dialect of Farroḵi, a township in the sub-province of Ḵur o Biābānak on the edge of the Great Persian Desert.

FARVI DIALECT, spoken in the township of Farroḵi in central Persia.

Farvi or Farvigi is the native dialect of Farroḵi, a township in the sub-province of Ḵur o Biābānak on the edge of the Great Persian Desert. The lexicon of Farvi was little known until Ṣādeq Kiā’s (q.v.) documentation was published posthumously in a multilingual dictionary (Kiā, 2011). On the other hand, our knowledge of Farvi syntax is limited to the scanty data in articles by Richard Frye (henceforth RF; pp. 212-15) and Kiā (1954). Notwithstanding Farroḵi’s population that surpasses two thousands, its vernacular is moribund. During the decades of expansion of modern education and media, Farvi has been thinning, and its number of speakers shrinking, to the extent that Farvi should be considered an endangered language.

Linguistic position. Farvi is closely related to Khuri and other varieties of the language group spoken in Ḵur o Biābānak. Although this language group is conventionally classified as a subgroup of Central Plateau dialects (Lecoq), the following historical phonology reveals how Farvi drifts away from them, while it shares significant isoglosses with Baluchi in various chronological stages of its development.

Noun Phrase. The nouns and pronouns indicate no gender or formal case. The plural marker is usually -(g)ún, as in gačegūn “children.” Possessives and adjectives follow the noun and are bound to it by an eżāfa marker: gol-e-suahr “red rose,” toxm-e-niang “egg,” šiv-e-mā “mother’s husband,” mā-ye-je “wife’s mother.”

Verb phrase. The verbal system of Farvi is based on the present stem (for the present indicative, imperative, and subjunctive) and the past stem (for the preterit, imperfect, perfect, and pluperfect). The lexical preverbs he- and al- are common; they may modify or change the meaning, e.g., či- “arrange” vs. al-či- “pick pieces from a flat surface” (= Pers. barčidan). Modal prefixes are durative di-, used in the present indicative and the imperfect; and non-durative b(V)- (superseded by preverbs), used in the subjunctive, imperative, and preterit. Examples: be-gin “see!” bi-gin-a “that I see,” bi-di-at “you saw,” di-gin-i “you see.” The negation morpheme n(V)- is prefixed to the stem; for example, be-n-gu-v-õ “I don’t want.”

Verbal endings consist of two sets. Set 1 endings, used in the present and the intransitive past, are singular 1 -a (sometimes rounded and/or nasalized), 2 -i, 3 -e (zero in the past), plural 1 -um, 2 -at, 3 -and. Set 2 is similar to the enclitic pronouns, and is used in the transitive past as subject (agent) markers: singular 1 -a, 2 -at/-et, 3 -a/-e, plural 1 -emun, 2 -etun, 3 -ayun. Examples for the second person singular: pres.: či keri “what are you doing?” past: bišehi “you went” vs. bidiat “you saw.” Imperative ending is zero for the singular: algaj “pluck!” hegij “sift!” begaf “weave!” begaz “run!” In addition to morphological distinction (Table 1), transitivity in the past tenses may play at syntactic level: in transitive past, there is a tendency for the Set 2 endings to move off the verb onto a preceding word, usually the direct object: pī-at či-e bigūt “what did your father say?” či-et bekarde “what did you do?”